Courtney McGrailSt Francis Uncensored
by Patrick Noonan OFM
(Choice Publishing, €10.99; visit www.choicepublishing.ie)
Since the election of the present Pope there has been an increase of interest in St Francis himself. But over the centuries the saint has become covered up with the sort of sentimental piety that obscures the real man and his associates, such as St Clare (called here “the indomitable pest of Popes”). Fr Noonan wants to cut through all that, and also to explain a little about the outlook of the Pope.
Fr Noonan himself has many years of experience in the countries of the South, especially in El Salvador, and South Africa. This book is informed by a need to make St Francis ‘at home’ in all kinds of other cultures aside from our own too conformable bourgeois existence. The book aims to provoke, when it explores the role of St Clare as an early protagonist of feminism, or compares the new movement St Francis started with the sort of activists we find today working among the poor of the world, and explores the image that St Francis has among Muslims after his pastoral visit to Egypt in 1219. The second part of the book dealing with this topic deserves to be widely read, but so to do the other parts. A ‘revisionist’ book, with the emphasis on the vision.
Gospel Reflections for Sundays of Year A: Matthew
by Donal Neary SJ
(Messenger Publications, €9.99)
These reflections had their origin in notes provided for a missalette series. But it is good to have them preserved in a more accessible form. Fr Neary’s ideas have been shaped by his years of pastoral activity. He knows what to say and how to say to make an impact on those whose hurried lives often leave little time for reflection at all. Though his readers have been hearing these passages read to them since childhood, it is always amazing how in the hands of a pastor like Fr Neary they can be made living and relevant again. But such reading is a kind of ‘sound-bite religion’. Hopefully this book will encourage many to go beyond the Sunday missalette to the full text of the Gospel.
NIV Manga Bible
illustrated by Siku
(Hodder and Stoughton, £16.99)
Here the text of the New International Bible is dressed out with illustration in the Japanese manga style by artist Siku. One is in favour of anything that makes people look again in a new way at familiar text, but this project seems to be misconceived.
The trouble is not so much the idea of manga illustrations, for in fact they provide a refreshing review of familiar scenes. Adam, for instance, is drawn as an athletic young white man, while Eve by contrast is made black – it would have been more challenging to some readers to have made Adam black and Eve white.
The trouble is the small format does not allow the illustration to achieve their full effect; designed for a larger page, here they are small and cramped and lose a great deal of their impact.